One in three households in America do business with Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial services company providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance through more than 10,000 stores and 12,000 ATMs and the Internet (wellsfargo.com and wachovia.com) across North America and internationally.
The company strives to find the best people from a diversity of backgrounds and cultures, give them the knowledge and training they need, allow them to be responsible and accountable for their businesses, and recognize them for outstanding performance.
The man tasked with finding ways to attract the best talent is Aaron Kraljev, Employment Marketing Manager. Recently, Aaron was kind enough to give us an inside look at his unique role at Wells Fargo and share his perspective on the industry and the DirectEmployers Association.
What challenges really keep you awake at night?
There’s no such thing as a marketing emergency, but people create them. It can be anything from the mundane dealing with a difficult internal partner, to the massive campaign launch that either a) didn’t work or b) was flawed, beyond repair. In the past, we were talking to students – a very finite group of folks. We knew what their passion-points were, what they needed and we had to meet those needs. The audience for employment is incredibly diverse. They have different needs and things that they hold dear. A checking account for a student in and of itself is a big deal, but it’s not vital. A job is vital and through a variety of different channels, I get communications from folks who have either been looking for a job, or, got an interview, didn’t get a job, and shared with me some of their frustrations. I try to respond to every single one of those because they want to be heard and have very real needs. I’m sensitive to the diversity of that group and the necessity for employment. That keeps me up at night. It’s not like your cable is out, the paper didn’t show up, or your socks don’t match. These are all very mundane things that happen to us all in our everyday lives. This [a job] is how you put food on your table and provide for your family. I get to thinking about 3:30 in the morning, are we really branding ourselves effectively? Are we helping job seekers to self-select and find a job that’s right for them? While we have 9,000-10,000 openings a month, we have 280,000 team members…we have some turn! And I think every organization does, but what can I do from wherever I’m at to help reduce the amount of turn and make sure we’re getting the right people in jobs, and that we’re putting them in a situations where they’re going to succeed?
Yes. And like you said, you’re giving them the feedback that they crave. Some of these people have never been in a job-hunting situation and don’t know what we know. They’re craving that knowledge of what’s going to help them in their quest to find that right fit.
That statement right there is exactly the reason why we need to be in the social media space. Whenever we get info on Facebook or Twitter, what you won’t find is here’s 9,000 Wells Fargo jobs, here’s what we pay or here’s what they do – it’s this is what you can do to find a job that’s a right fit for you here. That’s the biggest message we want to get across. Even if you don’t get a job with Wells Fargo, here’s what’s going to make you a better job seeker, a more informed applicant, or more attractive applicant. If somebody came to one of our sites or our Facebook page, and they learned something they used to find a job somewhere else, that’s fantastic. As long as we’re helping educate, it creates a value. I think that’s the most important thing.
I couldn’t agree more. And there’s not enough of that out there.
Especially in social media, people just kind of throw themselves out there and talk about themselves – look at us, we’re shiny and we’ve got great ads – and that’s not really the message we want to convey. We want to talk about the experience of people that work here and what a job seeker can do to be successful.
In keeping with that, what is unique about Wells Fargo and why would a candidate want to work there?
That’s a great question. Wells Fargo is unique for two main reasons. One is our history. We’ve been around for more than 150 years and our sheer size – almost 380,000 team members and all the different things we do as an organization. We don’t like to think of ourselves as a bank. You’re on your way to Starbucks, you’re doing whatever, you’ve got your checking account there, you drive by a Wells Fargo and that’s what a lot of people associate us with. Those two things make us unique.
I think what you would find out as a team member or throughout the interview process are some of the smaller things that I think make a huge difference. It is quite possible to have several different careers inside of Wells Fargo. Both my wife and I work for the bank. We’ve had several different careers. My first job at the bank was managing a branch inside the Safeway. I did that for about a year and a half and that’s really how I learned banking. I had come from marketing background and decided to make a change and learned about the financial services industry – Wells Fargo allows people to do that. This bank is full of folks who started out as tellers, collectors, at the trade desk, or what have you, and now they’re executives. Everybody says they have amazing benefits. Wells Fargo has unbelievable benefits. Tuition reimbursement is one of the things that allows employees to learn and grow. They learn the bank side of the business, but the bank also takes a vested interest in their education development and they will pay for that. They’ve got very aggressive benefits in terms of a 401(k) match and what they offer for health, medical and dental.
What types of people is Wells Fargo looking to recruit? What is the area where you have the biggest need?
I think the way our business is built and our distribution networking, the gross majority of our positions are entry-level. They’re either teller or banker positions in our store locations, or phone bankers. That’s a huge volume of need. We’ve got volumes of other positions as well, but if I were to pick three that were our highest volume requisitions, those would be them.
What is a unique position within the bank, other than yours, that some people might not be aware of?
Given our relative size and overall diversity in our business, I’m constantly seeing job postings. I got this one email three months ago and I don’t remember the job title, but basically what this person did was buy, sell and lease trains – locomotives in the Midwest. I had no idea that this was part of our organization, nor do I really have a marketing plan in my back pocket of how to market those types of job seekers. I get an email like that every 2 or 3 months where I’m just absolutely blown away. Certain jobs you’re going to find, but every once in awhile I’ll get one of these where I’m like I had no idea, and that’s a perfect example. This person is a train broker, and it’s part of one of our subsidiaries, or one of our joint venture businesses, and they had a pretty dire need for somebody to do that kind of thing. We have folks that are in leasing and business for farm machinery. That’s something else too that you just wouldn’t think a bank would be involved in. And then we’ve got highly technical folks. When you think of bank you don’t necessarily think of technology, but these are folks that are highly educated from Ivy League schools who have worked for some of the best and brightest in the industry. We obviously have a need to attract and to have as team members to kind of help prop us up from a technology standpoint.
How were you involved in the decision around becoming a Member?
When I came in October, our DirectEmployers contract was up. I got involved in that. I’ve learned a great deal about the relationship and what it means to be a member. I think one of the things I appreciate about membership with DirectEmployers is it’s highly effective – it’s a great use of our time and resources, but you all only want to do what’s best for our organization and job seekers, versus trying to make commissions. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you spend two or three hours a day on the phone with people trying to hit you with products, trying to get you to commit to things and just twisting your arm, it’s a really refreshing thing.
What would you say is your favorite DirectEmployers Member benefit?
Well, obviously just the kind of scope, depth and breadth of where our jobs get sent. My favorite thing that we’re not taking advantage of right now is the search engine optimization that is offered as part of your membership. We absolutely want to take advantage of that. Unfortunately, when you have a huge organization sometimes it’s hard to implement new programs because there are a lot of tweaks you’ve got to make internally. It’s something we absolutely need to take advantage of, because I think from a search engine perspective, we’re just doing a dreadful job and it’s a huge opportunity for us. We see all the reason and need, we just need to help our internal key members get there.
Why did you become a member and what is it that we do that others don’t?
I wasn’t around when this relationship was fostered. I will say from a from a compliance stand-point, our relationship goes a long way to make sure that we are doing a lot of the things we need to be doing to remain compliant. But it’s not just a compliance issue. I think if how we think of things as an organization, even if it wasn’t something that kept us in the clear, compliance is the right thing to do. I think it gets our jobs and opportunities in front of people that absolutely need to get them. It may not seem otherwise, but that’s the main reason.
